Jenny Plague-Bringer(28)

“Stop, stop,” Ward said, shaking his head. “Need him alive. For a few more minutes, anyway.”

Ward squatted on the floor next to the groaning, bleeding Darrell Morton.

“We know your daughter is alive,” Ward told him. “We need to know where she is before she kills again. This is your last chance.”

Darrell blinked and didn’t say a word.

“All right, Mr. Morton.” Darrell seized both sides of the man’s head and shoved his way inside, ripping through terabytes of the man’s memory. He found the earliest that interested him: Darrell’s wife, Miriam, dying horrifically as she gave birth to Jenny. The doctor and nurse that had ended up dead from Jenny’s touch, too. Darrell setting the place on fire, taking his baby and his deceased wife with him. The wife had been buried under a stone cairn right here, in the woods on the Morton property. Darrell’s struggle to raise his daughter without touching her, using gloves and even ski masks. Like a man caring for a pet scorpion, pouring his love onto something hideous. Pathetic.

Darrell knew that his daughter had killed a large number of people in town, that she’d faked her own death with the fire, that she was still alive somewhere.

Unfortunately, Darrell did not know where. He only knew that it was being handled somehow by the Barretts, the rich, connected family of Jenny’s consort, Seth Barrett. The family Ward couldn’t risk disturbing, not while Senator Mayfield remained alive. It made perfect sense, and it was damned inconvenient for Ward.

Something unexpected jutted out from Darrell’s memories. The night of the riot in Charleston, a young man with dirty blond hair and odd gray eyes had broken into Darrell’s house and attacked him. He’d seized Darrell’s arms and filled him with mind-shattering nightmares. The next clear memory was of Darrell waking up in the hospital and leaving, turning down the recommended psychiatric evaluation, partly because he had neither the insurance nor the money to pay for it.

The boy had a touch that spread fear. Darrell did not seem to know anything else about him.

Ward released the man’s head, letting it thump back onto the warped hardwood floor.

“Watch him,” Ward told his men. He walked down the hall, pulling on a pair of green biohazard gloves, its molecules woven so tightly that even the smallest scrap of a virus couldn’t pass through.

He passed a bathroom and glanced without interest into the open door of the man’s room. Another bedroom door stood closed. Jenny’s room. Ward turned the handle.

The room was small, with a single bed, a record player and a box of records. Clothes were spilling out of the dresser drawers and scattered on the floor as if the girl still lived here. A bookshelf held some ragged paperbacks, mostly cheap horror novels and some poetry, as well as homemade attempts at pottery. A picture of Jenny’s long-dead mother on the wall. Faded posters featured old country singers like Loretta Lynn.

One poster showed The Cure, the sissy English band kept alive by generations of sissy teenagers. Ward snorted, taken back to his teenage years in East St. Louis. He and his buddies had once stomped a few frilly brats outside a Cure concert. Later in life, he’d joined the Army, which he saw as the best way to escape the dying city and do a few important things in the world.

From the start, Ward had been nothing like the average soldier. He’d seen most of the recruits around him as either idealistic do-gooders or clueless kids, born without Ward’s instinctive understanding of power, or his paranormal edge.

With a touch, Ward could see anyone’s past. His ability to extract information from anyone had landed him a job with military intelligence. Ward had always employed textbook interrogation tactics as a performance for his commanding officers, but they were just for show.

He’d also learned he could he advance his career quickly by gathering dirt on his superiors. A well-placed comment or two would make it clear that he knew the officer was embezzling, cheating on his wife, or had a vast collection of boy porn at home.

He’d gone through Officer Candidate School and quickly scaled the bureaucracy, even gathering secrets on American politicians who were deemed obstacles to national security. He’d taken over the top-secret ASTRIA—where he was able to operate with an unusual lack of oversight, as the agency was both classified and no longer of great interest to the Pentagon—out of a desire to find others like himself. It looked like that choice was starting to pay off.

Ward marched back up the hall.

“Pack it up,” he told his two men. “Everything in the girl’s room, every stick of furniture. I want it all for analysis.”

“You can’t take Jenny’s things,” Darrell protested weakly, from where the two men held him to the floor. “That’s all I got left of her.”